January 15, 2007

• I think it's hypocritical for us to criticize the rowdy behavior at Saddam Hussein's execution.  To me, focusing on executing people "with dignity" is misplaced.  It's just a way to justify to ourselves that what we're doing when the state kills something isn't as barbaric as it really is.  A way of sanitizing death to leave our collective hands less dirty.  What would be better about killing him by lethal injection vs. a dignified hanging vs. what actually happened?  I guess you could say that in the first instance, there's more of an appearence of the rule of law.  And what separates execution from murder is the orderly process by which the law assesses someone's guilt, moral culpability, and then imposes punishment.  To say otherwise is to draw too black and white a line, rather than recognizing the shades of grey that do exist.  And appearences matter in law.  For courts to function effectively, not only do judgments have to be impartial, they have to seem impartial.  For otherwise, parties won't be able to plan their affairs around the law, since they won't be fully confident that its results aren't arbitrary.  So you could say that people have less incentives to obey criminal law if they know punishment is imposed randomly and they might get punished, even if innocent.

  But I think that all goes to whether a judgment will be entered (punishment imposed) rather than the manner in which it's imposed.  Or at least, most of the concern is at the threshhold level rather than the marginal variations beyond the threshhold. 

  There is the additional question of whether there's any political value to killing Hussein -- enough to justify capital punishment in his case, even though it's not morally justified for the typical murderer.  Before I get there, it's worth acknowledging that the leader of a country has the potential for far greater evil than any ordinary criminal (even Ted Bundy or Charles Manson).  So Hussein is among the top 100 or so people alive today -- at least in terms of actual death and harm imposed by him.  Maybe the top __ number is bigger, the only point being that's its quite small in comparison with the number of people alive today, or even the number of murderers.    But there's no bright line rule, for me, that indicates when someone deserves to die by capital punishment.  So rather than draw an arbitrary line, I eschew drawing a line at all -- opting to oppose it in all cases.  In general that's not a great way of going about things, but when it's a matter of life and death, it seems more palatable an approach.

  Turning back to whether it's worth killing Hussein for political reasons -- I don't think that justifies capital punishment in his special case either, for similar reasons to another reason why I'm against the death penalty in general actually.  We can't use other people as means to an end.  For the same reason that we can't kill murders to deter others from murdering, I don't think we can kill Hussein (or some other infamous leader) just to send a message to others. 

  So I would have opted to sentence him to life in prison.

  • 3:27 am
  • 1 Comment